The Mediterranean diet could be good for your gut bacteria (at least if you're a monkey)

The Mediterranean diet has many ticks — it's linked to lowered risk of many diseases, it'll likely help you live longer, and it's sustainable and delicious. It could also be good for your gut bacteria.

A study published in Frontiers in Nutrition links following the Mediterranean diet to higher numbers of beneficial bacteria in the gut, and lower numbers of malicious bacteria.

That's what happened when scientists from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina put "non-human primates" — crab-eating macaques — on a Mediterranean-inspired diet, and compared changes in their gut microbiome to macaques who ate a Western-style diet.

For humans, the Mediterranean diet is characterised by high amounts of olive oil, seafood, fruit, vegetables, legumes and grains.

“Our study showed that the good bacteria, primarily Lactobacillus, most of which are probiotic, were significantly increased in the Mediterranean diet group," said the study’s lead author Dr Hariom Yadav, an assistant professor of molecular medicine and microbiology and immunology, in a statement.

Though conducted on monkeys, the study will inform future research into how diet influences the human gut microbiome, thereby influencing our health.

“We have about 2kg of good and bad bacteria living in our gut,” said Yadav. “If the bacteria are of a certain type and not properly balanced, our health can suffer."